Browse Exhibits (1 total)

The White Top Folk Festival grew out of a suggestion made to Abingdon attorney John Blakemore that a fiddler’s contest be held on White Top on the 4th of July. 13 In addition to being an attorney, Blakemore was a well-connected politician and an officer in the White Top Company which owned the mountain. The wife of Blakemore’s cousin John Buchanan, Annabel Morris Buchanan was a member of the Federated Women’s Music Clubs of America and director of the Federation’s folk music section. A gifted musician in her own right, Mrs. Buchanan hosted a weekly Monday Afternoon Music Club in Marion, Virginia and in that capacity had become acquainted with John Powell, a southern classical musician of some distinction. “In addition to being a composer and prominent pianist, Powell lectured, wrote articles, and sponsored associations and festivals designed to promote the preservation of the folk music of the south.”  He was also an advocate for the belief that mountain life, and especially the ballads that musicologists
like Cecil Sharp and others had “discovered” in Appalachia a decade earlier, represented the last bastion of Anglo-Saxon purity in a rapidly expanding, increasingly urbanized, and ethnically diverse America.

[All That is Native and Fine, p. 211]